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Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

InfoQ attended the recent Integrate 2016 event in London, where Microsoft Integration technologies took center stage.Day 1 focused on the BizTalk, Logic Apps and API Management teams. Day 2 was focused on Azure App Service adoption metrics and the new server-less Azure Functions. Microsoft's Cloud Messaging team also spoke about adoption metrics and their work in the Open OPC UA working group. In addition to Microsoft presenters, the event also included presentations by Microsoft MVPs who are industry experts identified by Microsoft.

Azure App Service

First up on Day 2 was Chris Anderson, a program manager, on the Azure App Service team. Chris started out his talk by giving an overview of the Azure App Service platform which focuses on developer services including Mobile Apps, Web Apps, and the new server-less app platform called Azure Functions.

Next in his presentation, Anderson demonstrated some use cases of the new Azure Functions service that was launched recently at Build. One use case included Azure Functions being called from Azure Logic Apps.

Since Azure Functions include an HTTP endpoint, another scenario in which they can be used, is an Azure Function being protected by Azure API Management. Using Swagger, APIs can be designed which therefore allows client proxies to be generated that enable the Azure Function to be called. Within the Azure Function a variety of languages can be used to implement your API, including:

Java

C#

Node.js

Python

PHP

Batch

Bash

Azure Functions are priced based upon consumption, which provides customers with cost flexibility as their Azure Function usage increases.

Azure Cloud Messaging

Both Dan Rosanova, principal program manager, and Clemens Vasters, lead architect, from Azure’s cloud messaging team provided updates to their messaging platform and open initiatives they are involved in.

The first update came from Dan Rosanova on their Azure Premium Messaging service. InfoQ previously covered the public preview of this service in September 2015. The difference between premium messaging and the standard offering is with the premium service, customers get dedicated compute and isolation from other consumers of Service Bus. Premium messaging is sold in Messaging Units (MU) and a Service Bus Namespace can support up to 4 MUs by default. Additional MUs can be added through Microsoft support. Rosanova was able to provide some performance metrics of this service which includes the ability to process approximately 3000 messages per/second per MU.

In addition to Premium messaging metrics, Rosanova was able to share other consumption details of their messaging service, including:

Clemens Vasters provided some additional news in his talk including future support for Service Bus and Event Hub support on Azure Stack. Timelines and costs were not disclosed at this time, other than it will not occur in CY 2016 and that there will be some costs involved in using these platforms in Azure Stack.

Vasters also talked about his and Microsoft’s involvement in the OPC Foundation’s working group that is bringing in interoperability between industrial equipment/applications and Internet of Things connectivity. One of the key initiatives of this working group is to bring Publish-Subscribe messaging using the AMQP 1.0 protocol. AMQP 1.0 is an open messaging standard backed by many large organizations including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Microsoft, Red Hat and Software AG. It is also the preferred protocol when interfacing with Microsoft’s Cloud Messaging platform.

Azure Cloud Messaging- 3rd Party Monitoring

In addition to the announcements that Microsoft made in the Cloud Messaging space on Day 2, BizTalk360, a Microsoft gold partner, announced a SaaS based Service Bus monitoring service. The service will be known as ServiceBus360 which will complement their flagship product BizTalk360. ServiceBus360 will provide governance, monitoring, alerting and analytics for customer Service Bus environments. Organizations interested in a preview of ServiceBus360 can register here.

Additional Coverage

Day 3 of Integrate 2016 included many sessions from Microsoft MVPs. You can find content about these sessions from the following blog posts: